Month: November 2018

Soon after Sean Healey learned he had been stricken with ALS, he decided to fight back in the best way he knew how: by investing in the search for a solution.

The fruits of that decision became public on Wednesday, when Massachusetts General Hospital said it will launch the Sean M. Healey and AMG Center for ALS, funded by $40 million-plus in donations. The Healey Center will help coordinate research efforts into finding better ways to treat — and eventually cure — the fatal neurodegenerative disease.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — May 15, 2018 — Aquinnah Pharmaceuticals, leaders in stress granule biology, an exciting new target for the development of neurodegenerative therapeutics, announced today that it has been awarded $3.4 million from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) in a competing grant to advance novel therapeutic drug candidates towards the clinic for treating patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

On September 15, the ALS Multidisciplinary Clinic and Neurological Clinical Research Institute (NCRI) held their annual “Your Day: ALS Care and Research Symposium” at the Massachusetts General Hospital for people living with ALS, their family members, and their caregivers.

Chief of Neurology, Merit Cudkowicz, MD, and her team, shared the latest news and information about ALS research and clinical care.

WORCESTER – Researchers at UMass Medical School on Wednesday announced a potential new breakthrough in the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The proposed gene therapy technique, which involves using synthetic microRNAs to switch off the proteins linked to the degenerative neurological disease, has so far proven effective in animal experiments, and is headed to clinical trials on patients.

The treatment would only be for the roughly 10 percent of ALS patients who have the familial version of the disease, however, according to Christian Mueller, a faculty member at UMass who worked… more